It’s a little-known act of bravery – how two British clerics rescued 1,800 Jews from the Nazis by baptising them.
First there was Oskar Schindler, then Sir Nicholas Winton. Now the names of the Reverends Hugh Grimes and Fred Collard are to be added to the roll of honour of those who helped hundreds of Jews escape the clutches of the Nazis.
But whereas Schindler used cunning and industrial muscle to protect his factory workers, and Winton his diplomatic ingenuity to get more than 650 children out of Czechoslovakia by train, the two British clerics did their bit in a more unusual way.
In just four months in 1938, they baptised some 1,800 Viennese Jews into the church, in the hope that the resulting certificate of Christianity would help provide them with safe passage out of occupied Austria and into a less hostile country. For although Austria’s neighbours were wary of allowing a wholesale influx of Jewish refugees, they were more prepared to admit those who could demonstrate, albeit with a single piece of paper, that they belonged to the Christian religion.
The process began on a small scale, soon after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, in March 1938. But with the Austrians displaying an even keener appetite for persecution of the Jews than their German neighbours, the trickle of converts arriving at Christ Church, in Jauresgasse, became a flood.
“They began to form queues outside the chaplaincy,” reports historian Giles Macdonogh, who, with British historian Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, has been researching the story of the mass baptisms for the past decade. “On the 14th of June Grimes baptised eight Jews, on the 19th he baptised 12, and on the 26th he baptised 19. He reached 103 on the 10th of July, and his record was 229 on the 25th.”This extraordinary story began its journey into the public realm in 1999, when Wentworth-Stanley was approached by the then chaplain of Christ Church, Vienna, Jeremy Peake. “He wanted me to design a plaque commemorating the work of Grimes and Collard,” recalls Wentworth-Stanley, a long-time resident of Vienna. “As it happened, his brother John had been my housemaster at Eton, and had made me into something of a historian. And the more I delved into the church’s registers, the more interesting the whole story became.”
For not only did his digging unearth the hitherto untold tale of Grimes’s and Collard’s mass baptismals, it also uncovered a hub of secret agent activity connecting the church and the British Embassy. It involved a dashing MI6 man by the name of Captain Tommy Kendrick, a shadowy verger and ex-jockey called Fred “Siegfried” Richter, and a sinister German double agent known as Karl Tucek.
For at the same time as Grimes and Collard were fast-tracking hundreds of terrified Jews through an accelerated Christianity course – they would learn the catechism and Lord’s Prayer one day and be baptised the next – Kendrick was running an espionage operation to obtain information on German shipyards and submarine deployment. He used Christ Church for his assignations with Tucek. Meanwhile, Richter was operating as a middle man for both enterprises, receiving ”introduction’’ fees from Jews wanting to be baptised, and more cash from MI6 for lining up possible agents for Kendrick.
“Christ Church only seats 165 people, so you can imagine the kind of overcrowding there must have been on busy baptism days,” says Wentworth-Stanley.
“I have spoken to women who were there as young girls and they say it was utter pandemonium and chaos,” confirms Macdonogh, who touched upon the subject in his book 1938: Hitler’s Gamble.
“For some years, Christopher and I have been trying to get publishers interested in this story, with very little success,” he adds. “And, unfortunately, the number of people still alive who went through the baptism process is dwindling.”
One person who did experience it, albeit unwittingly, is Dr Stefan Popper, the coroner who presided over the inquest on the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. Now 79, he decided at the age of 12 to convert from Judaism to Christianity, only to learn from his father that he and his twin sister had been baptised into the faith already, in Vienna.
For most “converts”, of course, the adoption of Christianity was unlikely to be anything other than a means of getting out of Austria to escape the increasingly violent Nazis.
Categories: UK